Wednesday, 12 July 2017

The Azure Hand - guest post by Cally Phillips

As a result of my writing activities, I've received many fascinating "out of the blue" contacts from people from all parts of the world. These are often not only enjoyable but also informative. So it was when I was contacted by Cally Phillips last year. She told me about a book and author I'd never heard of. I was tempted to explore further, and I'm very glad I did. The book in question was The Azure Hand, which thanks to Cally's enterprise is now being republished. I've invited Cally to tell the story herself:

"The Azure Hand was
first published on 24th July 1917, one of several posthumous works
by the writer Samuel Rutherford Crockett, who died in April 1914. Crockett is better known, where he is known
at all any more, as the writer of stirring ‘boys own’ stories of history,
adventure, romance set in rural Scotland, France or Spain. Once dismissed as ‘Kailyard’ he has more
recently been seen as coming from the Stevensonian tradition.

In his lifetime he lay claim to more than sixty published works of fiction and
he is hard to pin down because over the twenty plus years of his writing career he adapted and adopted
different styles in order to keep in step with the changing fashions of popular
fiction. It was not always a successful
tactic and the fact that The Azure Hand
was never published in his life-time suggests it was one of his
‘failures’. However, with a centenary
edition now due out, a new generation of readers are able to judge for
themselves exactly what kind of book this is.

As a detective fiction novel it is unusual, though not
unique among Crockett’s work. He started
experimenting with this form – via ‘sensationalist’ fiction in the early 1900s,
but he never seemed to quite ‘hit the mark’ for the market at the time. Looking back with the benefit of a century of
hindsight however, we can see that he was in fact being quite experimental both
in form and content and The Azure Hand
dating well before the Golden Age of Crime presages it in some ways. It is, to quote Martin Edwards a: ‘very modern take on fictional
detection. It shows a determination to
pick up some of the then popular tropes (clues, footprints etc) and do
something relatively fresh with them.’

In 1917 Crockett’s widow, chasing
an income from his royalties, persuaded Hodder and & Stoughton (with whom
he had a long and fruitful connection) to publish The Azure Hand. Being during the First World War it was a small
print run and the quality of the publication was poor – and it soon went out of
print into obscurity.

Ayton Publishing Limited was set
up in 2012 with the explicit aim of promoting works by and about Crockett. In
2014 the 32 Volume Galloway Collection was published to commemorate the
centenary of his death. This was
followed in 2015 by The Rainbow Crockett series (seven of his works for
children) and since then sundry other works by and about him have been
published and re-published. It seemed only fitting to bring out The Azure Hand on the centenary of its
original publication date.

You can purchase the Ayton
Publishing centenary edition in paperback direct from www.unco.scot online
for the discounted price of £9.99.

To find out more about the life
and work of S.R.Crockett you can visit the Galloway Raiders website www.gallowayraiders.co.uk which is
the home of the S.R.Crockett literary society and a great place to start your
exploration of all things Crockett related."

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About Me

I've published eighteen crime novels, including series set in Liverpool and the Lake District, and received the Poirot Award recently for my contribution to the crime genre. I've won the CWA Short Story Dagger and CWA Margery Allingham Prize, and The Golden Age of Murder earned the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, and H.R.F.Keating awards. I am consultant for the British Library's Classic Crime series, and author of The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books. I'm Chair of the CWA and President of the Detection Club. I've edited thirty anthologies, published about sixty short stories, and written seven other non-fiction books..